François Bourassa dit La Ronde

Biography

In 1693, after François Bourassa failed to return from a western trading journey, documents described Marie Le Ber as his widow. He was still alive.

François had come from Saint-Hilaire-de-Loulay in Poitou, in western France, where he was born around 1659 to François Bourassa and Marguerite Dugas. He married Marie on July 4, 1684 at Fort Saint-Louis at Chambly, on the Richelieu River southeast of Montréal in present-day Québec, Canada. The marriage was entered in the Contrecœur register. Her Le Ber relatives connected him to a family already involved in the fur trade.

An engagement made by René Legardeur de Beauvais on June 27, 1688 took François into the Ottawa-country trading network with his brother-in-law Joachim-Jacques Le Ber. Another agreement in the Legardeur commercial network, made on May 11, 1690, concerned travel to Michilimackinac, in the straits region between present-day Michigan’s two peninsulas, or the Bay of the Puants, now Green Bay in Wisconsin. His prolonged absence followed that journey. Published abstracts of the 1693 agreements show Marie and her mother arranging support with Claude Caron while their husbands were missing.

By 1694 François was again conducting business. A concession that September gave him land at Fontarabie near La Prairie. Later records show him and Marie leasing farmland and exchanging property between La Prairie and Chambly. These transactions place the returning voyageur within the continuing work of maintaining a household and a farm.

François's life ended in 1708. An accounting that June identifies Marie as his widow; an inventory of their marital property followed in 1710.

Their children included René Bourassa dit La Ronde, baptized at La Prairie on December 21, 1688.